Education Commons^™

Exposing Problems Teaching Students Morphological Species Identification, Trevor Stamper, Lauren Weidner, Gregory Nigoghosian, Ludmila D. Nunes

IMPACT Presentations

When dealing with physical remains, morphological assessment for species is a traditional approach to entomological specimen identification. A dichotomous key guides the user through taxa determination for a specimen by providing a series of dual-choice nodes that center around morphological differences. Each nodal choice leads to either a new set of dichotomous choices or a taxa decision. We evaluated student’s ability to utilize a dichotomous key down to species for a limited set of taxa, by reviewing their nodal decisions along with their confidence level using a Likert scale (1-5).

Along with individual decision recording, students conducted a post-decision group …

Inclusive Teaching Strategies: An Evaluation Of Course Structure And Summative Assessment In Introductory Biology, Oluwaseun O. Agboola

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Several active learning strategies have been used when increasing the structure of a course as increasing course structure has been known to improve student learning in introductory STEM courses. Much has been studied on the value of frequent formative assessment; however, few studies have evaluated the effective modes of delivering summative assessment. This study examines the use of summative assessment as an inclusive teaching practice to improve first generation college student success in introductory biology and also uses faculty surveys to find out how instructors structure their introductory biology course and why they are structured that way. Final exams were …

Various Forms Of Student Engagement And Student Learning, Dan Richard, Melissa Newberry

Dan Richard

Previous research indicates that student engagement is multi-dimensional. Numerous engaged or active learning strategies (e.g., think-pair-share, problem-based learning, interactive games) emphasize some dimensions of student engagement but not others. The current project assesses the learning impact of a diversity of active learning strategies employing various dimensions of student engagement within three sections of a course in Social Psychology. Direct assessment of student performance on multiple-choice exams as well as indirect assessment of student preferences for learning activities will be addressed. In this session, participants will review original research on student engagement, receive examples of course activities, evaluate these activities on …